PUBLIC INFORMATION OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
PASADENA, CALIF. 91109. TELEPHONE (818) 354-5011
PHOTO CAPTION P-37593
This picture of Antarctica is a mosaic of 40 images
obtained by the Galileo spacecraft's camera using the
red, green, and violet filters. When the images were
taken several hours after Galileo's Earth flyby on
December 8, 1990, the spacecraft was about 200,000
kilometers (124,000 miles) from Earth.
Surrounding the icy continent, the dark blue of three
oceans may be seen: the Pacific to the lower right, the
Indian to the upper right, and a small section of the
Atlantic at the upper left. Nearly the entire continent
was sunlit at the time, just two weeks before Antarctic
midsummer. The South Pole is left of center; the arc of
dark spots extending below there and to the right is the
Transantarctic Mountain Range. To the right of the
mountains is the vast Ross Ice Shelf and its sharp border
with the dark waters of the Ross Sea, merging into the
South Pacific. The faint blue line along the curved limb
of Earth, at the bottom, marks our planet's atmosphere.
The Galileo project is managed for NASA's Office of Space
Science and Applications by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory;
its mission is to study Jupiter and its satellites and
magnetosphere after multiple gravity-assist flybys at Venus
and Earth.
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